By Sahil Kapur - NBC News
WASHINGTON - That Joe Biden has chosen Kamala Harris as his running mate creates a dilemma for President Donald Trump's campaign, which has no immediate answer on how to compete against her.
Moments after the announcement, one of Trump's top advisers, Katrina Pierson, slammed Harris in a statement as someone who will "try to hide her prosecutorial record" in California (she's been described by some critics as too harsh on that), and as someone who will appease the "anti-police extremists", "false" and slave of the "radicals".
Those early attacks paint a contradictory portrait of Harris and show that the campaign to re-elect the president has yet to settle on a coherent and consistent way to criticize her.
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"This really ties the hands of the Trump campaign - whether they portray it as pro-police or anti-police," said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor and Trump supporter. "They will have to decide," he adds.
Harris was difficult to rank ideologically during the Democratic presidential primaries, leaving many voters wondering what he really stood for and stood for. In the end that hurt her candidacy and forced her to exit the race in December 2019, even before the first votes were cast in Iowa.
But now that makes her a more complex target for Trump, who has also spent work trying to land a substantial blow to Biden : During the Democratic primary, Harris was a rare candidate, who used to be among the top in polls, and however, he never earned a mocking nickname from the president.
That has changed.
A video that Trump tweeted blames Harris for "embracing Bernie's health plan" and for "asking for billions in new taxes."
But Harris actually abandoned Senator and Democratic pre-candidate Bernie Sanders' plan during the primaries, and one of the policies that set her apart from the rest was a $ 3 trillion tax cut for low- and middle-income people.
California Sen. Kamala Harris speaks during a January 2019 rally in Oakland, Calif. Noah Berger / AFP via Getty Images
The announcement promises that Biden and Harris "will jointly embrace the radical left."
"Slow Joe and False Kamala: Perfect for each other, lousy for America," says the narrator of the video.
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel responded by focusing on Harris's support for "abolishing private health insurance," a stance Harris took early in the primaries and later abandoned, leading to criticism from the left. .
McDaniel said that this decision by Biden, the alleged Democratic candidate, shows that "the mob on the left is controlling Biden's candidacy, just as they would control him as president."
When Pierson was asked in a call Tuesday how the Trump campaign reconciles his depiction of Harris as a police representative with the president's speech that he's the tough guy himself , Pierson said that was "confusing. things".
Biden chooses Kamala Harris as his running mate. Trump calls her "rude"
Aug. 12, 202003: 09"She is a phony. She was chasing the wrong people," Pierson told reporters. "When you don't go after gang members, but you do go after citizens, for example, black men on the issue of marijuana, something that she admitted to doing, she is actually maintaining a double standard."
Accepted, though not necessarily lovingly
Electing Harris earned Biden praise from progressive and moderate Democrats, from former Democratic President Barack Obama to progressive Bernie Sanders and Jim Kessler, executive vice president of the centrist group Third Way.
"People want to classify it under one ideology or another, when in reality it tends to be more like a barometer, similar to Biden, but not as much like him and not as conciliatory towards Republicans," said Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for the left-wing Justice Democrats group. , who endorsed Sanders in the presidential primaries.
Harris, 55, a first-term senator from California, would make history as the first woman, the first black woman and the first Asian American to become vice president. She is considered acceptable, though not always fondly, by a broad spectrum of the party.
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Aug. 12, 202002: 20Some Republicans said a Biden-Harris administration would be extreme and inept, an image that may make some wonder how scared they must be if they would be too ineffective in implementing his agenda.
"By selecting Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's team has shown how radical and incompetent a Biden administration would be," Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, tweeted Tuesday.
Trump himself criticized Harris after the announcement, calling her "disgusting" ( nasty ) and "very disrespectful" to Biden, apparently referring to a debate early in the campaign in which she blamed him for becoming homesick for having served in the Senate. with those who sought racial segregation.
"I didn't think I was going to pick her," the president told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. "And it has a lot of difficult things to explain." Minutes later, she left the press conference.